Sidecar revs up new marketplace for riders to pick their driver

San Francisco’s Sidecar is taking an innovative tack to vie with smartphone-ride leaders Uber and Lyft.

Sidecar’s new marketplace model, announced Wednesday, lets passengers shop for rides, viewing information on the drivers’ ratings, type of cars, pricing and current location. Drivers will be able to set their own prices and tweak their profiles with new photos, for instance, to compete for riders.

Sidecar also announced that it scooped up $10 million in funding, bringing its total raised to over $20 million.

The new marketplace “is a long-term vision to really change the game so riders have a choice and drivers have more control of their experience,” said Sunil Paul, Sidecar co-founder and CEO.

Passengers can view all kinds of driver criteria. “In Chicago where we’ve been testing it, there’s a guy who plays audiobooks and is currently playing Harry Potter,” Paul said. “There are people who serve cupcakes; drivers who give away free rides occasionally.”

In Los Angeles, the other market where Sidecar tested the model, drivers with upscale vehicles like Mercedes and BMWs (who can charge a premium for those cars) “found that they were getting more ‘date rides,’ as opposed to run-of-the-mill doing errands,” he said.

All the new transportation networking company, or TNC, services let riders use a smartphone app to summon a car, usually driven by a freelance driver in his or her own car.

Sidecar has long touted its distinction as the only ride service to show the trip cost before a passenger even gets in a car. That’s possible because riders provide their destinations in advance.

Paul took pains to point out that Sidecar’s approach differentiates it from Uber’s surge pricing, in which the entire fleet may charge more (or less) at certain times, such as New Year’s Eve.

Paul himself usually picks up Sidecar riders headed downtown every morning after he drops his children at school in Pacific Heights, he said.

“The biggest feedback I’ve learned from them is that people really like the price certainty,” he said. “They like knowing right up front that a ride will cost $10 or $15; there’s no surprise at the end. With Uber, most people don’t want to do the math of 1.475 times x.”

All the smartphone-enabled ride services refer to themselves as “ride-sharing companies.” Critics have said that’s inaccurate since they provide paid rides from drivers who go where a passenger dictates. But Sidecar’s new approach will enable it to more closely approximate ride-sharing.

“Increasingly we see drivers who use this in more of a car-pool mode,” Paul said. “They can set up filters so they can pick up people on their way to somewhere they were already going. If I’m already driving from the Marina to South of Market, for instance, I can set up my filters so I make just enough to cover my parking.”

On the funding frontier, Sidecar disclosed that it raised $10 million in August led by Union Square Ventures, with Correlation Ventures, Avalon Ventures and SoftBank Capital also on board. The money will help it expand technology, operations and marketing for the new thrust, Paul said.

That amount is dwarfed by the $258 million Uber raised last year, which gives the company a $3.5 billion valuation, according to published reports.

Uber and its low-cost UberX service have dominated the TNC services, leading some to dismiss Sidecar as an also-ran.

But Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson, who is joining the Sidecar board, had a different perspective, comparing Sidecar to Etsy, which provides “something unique and personal,” while Uber resembles Amazon, which offers “the lowest price, quick delivery and confidence,” he wrote in a blog post.

“Uber is efficient and Sidecar is personal,” he wrote. “And we believe there is room for both of them to build big businesses in mobile transportation.”

Union Square clearly believes there’s lots of opportunity in mobile transportation, because it has also invested $30 million in Hailo, a smartphone taxi-hailing app that’s big in Europe and the East Coast.

Sidecar just passed the two-year anniversary of its first ride, and has now provided more than 1 million rides, Paul said. In the Bay Area, it operates in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland. It’s also in Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego, Seattle, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Boston.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Twitter: @csaid